As Much As

About this Book

Continuing and expanding on themes in his earlier books: the complexity and inexhaustible nature of the world and imagination's unique access to it, these poems do not let us forget the privilege and magic of living in these bodies. Drawing intimately from nature, science, art, history, and subjective interiors, these are exuberant poems in which seeming and as if cannot be used up, and the distance between inner and outer dissolves. The author is a visual artist as well as a poet and images reveal, like light through a prism, the hidden components of the colour filled common, and work to demolish the myth of simplicity, boredom, and the pat answer.

Author Biography

ALLAN PETERSON is a American poet and visual artist whose writing has appeared in print and online literary jour als for over twenty years. His prize-winning collections, All the Lavish in Common (2005 Juniper Prize, University of Massachusetts), and Anonymous Or (2001 Defined Providence Prize) are accompanied by six chapbooks, most recently, Omnivore from Bateau Press in 2009. Commentaries and reviews of his poetry have appeared in: The Believer, The Yale Review, Boston to Berlin, Publisher’s Weekly, and most recently in poet and critic Stephen Burt’s book of essays, Close Calls with Nonsense: Reading New Poetry. A recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and The State of Florida, he and his wife, Frances Dunham, an environmental activist, divide their time between Gulf Breeze, Florida and Ashland, Oregon.

Read a sample from this book

AS MUCH AS

I have taken my chair into the undergrowth.
I sit above the dog long gone.
Around me an oval unfolds, the arcs of my vision
like the simplified maps
of the Middle Ages relying on Scripture,
not on looking for detail,
a world in a circle with no moving parts.
But this is not simple.
It would take days of naming to begin
to announce my visitors,
seeing within seeing like Hooke or Leeuwenhoek.
Said this way with exuberance,
it may fail to resemble any place you know.
But that is the way of attention;
it brings more than expected. And so before me
is the hot and moist, the four
elements and then some. The azalea as the answer
to iodine while spider silks tell the wind
better than the nylon sock or brass chicken on a rod.
And what looked alive was alive, and alive
within alive, and alive within that.
As far as I know. As I can see.
As far back as I remember. As much as I can stand.

SOMETHING IMPORTANT

Whose heels light up with each step
from pressure of the avenidas
going one way, calles the other,
laces where they cross,
have steps like soft coughs coming
from next door.
It is to be expected that in explanations
speed will fit into the metaphors
along with footbones and names of shore birds
for what they do—turnstone, skimmer,
and the way I think of your body beside me
like a hurdler in love and lofting backwards
arching over a bar, things linking up
by themselves, a pattern sewing Paraguay to stars
enough to give you the idea
something important is happening and something
important could be said in something
fragile as a poem about the capability of blood
and running as the joggers are joined
by bicycles with little reflectors on the spokes
so the lighted heels and eccentric spinning
join the moving stars and the fixed stars,
some in Orion, some along the driveway.

Reviews

Review: by Stephen Burt for The Boston Review, Jul/Aug 2011

In the Details
Stephen Burt

What if all that mattered in a life, all that stuck in the mind or pulled at the heart, were the welldefined events and decisions: where to live, what to do for a living, when to get married, whether to go to war? What would we miss? Almost everything that makes a life worth living. We want not just actions and consequences, victories and defeats, but dragonflies and paperclips, daydreams and counterfactual syllogisms. And perhaps poetry—that verbal art form without obvious consequence, whose shapes are not the shapes of events and plots—best suits those apparently negligible phenomena: if it cannot preserve them, it can at least show how we care.

That is not the only goal for poets, nor is poetry the only art that adopts it (Virginia Woolf to the white courtesy telephone, please). But it is a goal that many poets take on, by precept or example, and there may be no better example right now than Allan Peterson. No other poet—to judge by this third book, As Much As—focuses so fully on the inward effects of apparently inconsequential observations; no other poet makes them speak so well. Though he entitles one poem “Pure Description,” Peterson almost never describes scenes literally and at length; poets who do so can lose a lopsided contest against the resources of visual art, as Peterson must know (until 2005 he taught painting and ran the art department at Pensacola State College in Florida).

Instead, Peterson uses what he sees as a starting point for effects of inwardness, of ratiocination, above all of analogy. His title means that anything can matter as much as anything else, approached rightly, but it also means that he will use as much of “as”—as many similes—as he can. Unmoored from action, without preset pattern — no rhyme schemes, no New Sentences, no Oulipian bravado—his relatively short poems add to the world they explore by webs of simile, by like and as and so. “Docks along the coast looked like a thumb piano. / I listened.” “One harebell starts the yard in its frenzy / of reexplaining. / What takes its place appears lovingly / like caressing a pet.” Bird song consists of “short notes like dog names, / one or two syllables, something unmistakable.”

Wrong numbers on a telephone exist “within hearing but unheard / even when you hold them to your ear / the way people will touch a photo / in a private ritual.” Such quirky, ramifying similes cherish the evanescent, the fleeting, either in optics or in human behavior: phenomena slip away, and the poem races after them. Twice Peterson compares his art to a search, in high grass, for a cheetah, and once (in a poem called “Cover”) to the gaze of a hunting dog:

Sometimes I look at the landscape the
way our spaniel stared
at the wall like an idiom,
a meadow of stickpins and seeded
fields hiding lovers
whose eyes glow red in the distance.

In his happiest moments, Peterson, like Woolf, may vanish into his impressions: “I forgot for a moment what I intended. / I turned like birds, like a knife in the light, and disappeared.” Such times, such “hours . . . so taken with themselves,” feel like writing a new love’s name all over your notebooks — the only instance of making a word more solid by repeating, when ordinarily it dissolves — clinging expectantly to the surprising irregularities as door glass holds houseflies. Peterson’s visual gifts — so attentive to freshness, so careless about decorum — can make most other poets seem like they aren’t really looking. He uses those gifts to hint at an order in nature, explicable, if at all, by the natural sciences, without first or final cause:

Leaf, whether gold or hickory, glitters
like Las Vegas.
Foil, whether beaten sheet or a
hastened plan thwarted,
gleams as if fresh from the
photographer’s sinks,
and anvils of vapor rise above the
island like distractions.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.” Peterson’s world has grandeur, but no God. Elsewhere he makes gentle jokes against seekers of bulwarks, “form in poetry, god in the bread, / the old unchanging — all confirmed in the thirsty nervousness of sleep,” that is, not confirmed by the continual, smallscale surprises of waking life. “No Gods Needed” begins, “Saying bird is too big”; even “swallow” and “syrinx” attract suspicion, being names for classes, human impositions of human orders, rather than single things found and described. But suspicion does not mean rejection; against simpler poets’ claims that we should never generalize, Peterson acknowledges that we do — otherwise we could not speak at all. The best observers test their generalities against experience, seeing how much they can hold: “We consult the table of breaking strengths. We generalize
wildly, / hempen or wire.” So “Pure Description” ends.

Peterson’s lines are a mess, or they look like a mess: never songlike, thickly chromatic, preferring the rhythmically or syntactically awkward to the cleanly predictable. Movements from the literal to the figurative, or from sight to emotion and thought, serve almost like changes of harmony, changes of key. (The poems rarely resolve into tonic or even dominant; they do not end where they began.) In his mix of apparent ungainliness with precise attention to his own ideas, Peterson shows the benefits and the risks of a style developed in relative isolation. “I have no training in writing.

I have taken no courses, attended no workshops,” he told an interviewer nine years ago. Though he began to write seriously in the 1960s, he did not start publishing verse until twenty years later. Apparent inattention to tone, to audience (as in Marianne Moore, as in A. R. Ammons), itself becomes a tone, a slightly antisocial,
or nerdy, focus on the recording of thought, on “seeing the smallest thing.”

The poems bear the marks of a visual artist, but also (as with Ammons) the impress of the natural sciences, attracted to counterintuitive, carefully evidenced claims about nonhuman life: “millipedes scattered, earwigs / applying their calipers to gravity,” “the mapping gnats, the dry and polished swallows,” “magnets’ spinning and clicking little dogs.” To see things clearly is to see them change. The title poem examines “undergrowth,” where “what looked alive was alive”: “It would take days of naming to begin / to announce my visitors, / seeing within seeing like Hooke or Leeuwenhoek,” pioneers of microscopy, “while spider silks tell the wind / better than the nylon sock or brass chicken on a rod.” Wind changes that web, as all things and all scenes change in time:

Nothing is motionless, not the painted portrait
blinking while you’re away,
whose acids are discoloring buttons,
whose frame
is oxidizing while moistening its eyes,
or the uneasy sky pieced together
from brushstrokes.

That painted portrait (like a person, it seems to blink) and that sky (it looks like a painting, with clouds as brush strokes) both show how the world is in flux, prone to “so many accidents.” Even the atoms dance, as in Lucretius, and animals, too, become their own temporal traces: “Its very tail makes a river of the fox, / raccoon a sleeping creek in the leafed trees.” A secularist and a devotee of brief phenomena, Peterson cannot help seeing details (and thinking about how we see them) so finely and oddly that his world seems about to dissolve into patternless flecks.

And yet Peterson does not let his poems dissolve; they come back not just to things seen, but to things said, to claims about how we understand, or cannot quite understand, “the whim of minute,” the passage of hours or years. His poems can begin with perception but end in metacognition, thinking about how we think, how our thoughts go astray. Anonymous Or (2002) and All the Lavish in Common (2006) came close to the semi-sense, the evaded sense, of an Ashbery, asking us to suspend our disbelief, and suspending their own syntactic endpoints, almost indefinitely. As Much As never gets so intricate. For one thing, it’s more insistently visual, and for another, the poems don’t have the room. It is, though, just as idiosyncratic — you may have to reread before you can know how one notion, one comparison, leads to the next within this unusual mind.

Though he does describe extreme events (for example, a hurricane), Peterson remains a poet of the emotional middle range, of careful fascinations, domestic affections, ill-managed fears. His inner quarrels vex him, but do not turn violent: “I argue with my hands as if they were airports, / waving at arrivals, sad at departures”; “my window . . . is my sane partner though its dead calm / grieves me.” Yet once you get used to reading him you can find anger, even despair, especially when he contemplates the environment.

“No Uranium” shows no love for that fissile element, but it could not be chanted at demonstrations; rather, it tries to imagine the calm, apolitical state of mind that its topic has ruled out, “quietly reflecting the grief of phenomena ecstasy / as if visiting Montana / believing the fiction of pure water”—that is, ignoring the damage the mines have done—“with no obligation / but to say this is thinking see how exquisite / And then the gold alone.”

Nor is that poem alone. “Pillow of Stones” views a planetary future so far away that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, and therefore the height of the ocean, goes back down: “Sometime the sea will lessen / and there will be cliffs like Dover / carbon will tell you how heartless we were.” Most of that poem concerns a burnt (carbonized) skeleton excavated at the Mayan city of Tikal, “a burial with a necklace of dentalia / dust in his eyes.” Our human sacrifices are not so elegant, but the Mayan fate may be ours, too. This least urgent, least moralizing of recent styles turns out to bear an ethical charge after all: to look at the scenes outside us and around us, so potent with prompts for moment-by-moment imagining, is also to wonder what we will do to them, how they will—as we will—disappear.